Thursday, 16 March 2017

Broken Age (PC)

This month on Super Adventures I'm playing Broken Age, formerly known as Double Fine Adventure back in its Kickstarter days.

Though this isn't one of them Kickstarter success stories like Giana Sisters, FTL, Pillars of Eternity and the rest, this is THE Kickstarter success story, the one that kickstarted all the others by proving that game developers could actually crowd-fund niche video game projects that publishers would never touch. In this case Tim Schafer wanted to make an old school point-and-click adventure game like the ones he worked on at LucasArts during the 90s.

They asked for $400,000 ($300,000 for the game, $100,000 for a documentary), which seemed like they were pushing their luck a little, but soon people were lining up to take a risk in the hopes of getting another Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle or Grim Fandango. They ended up raising a massive $3,336,371 in the end, which is clearly $3,038 too much. Except not really, as even after getting over 8 times the amount they wanted they still ran out of cash and had to split the game up into two parts, with their plan being to fund the second half with their earnings from the first half.

Broken Age: Act 1 came out in 2014 (just 2 years later than planned), but I've written 2015 up there as the release date because I'm playing the complete product here, with both acts welded together into one seamless whole. I remember that its second act wasn't all that well received, on account of it being bastard hard due to overcompensation after criticism of Act 1, but that's about where my knowledge of the game ends, so I'm not really sure what to expect from this. Though I'm hoping it's like a cross between Broken Sword and Dragon Age, or maybe Brain Age and... damn I can't think of another game with 'Broken' in the title.

By the way, the game supports widescreen just fine, but it's making me rescale the window manually by dragging the edges around and every time I start it up it resets to defaults, so I'm leaving the title screen how I found it to teach Double Fine a lesson. Also I think I like it better in 4:3 anyway, as there's more clouds.

(Click the screenshots to view them slightly bigger than they are here but not as big as they'd be for most players.)

Well that's a... unique art style. Interesting how Double Fine decided to make their traditional old school retro adventure game look nothing like anything Tim Schafer ever worked on at LucasArts.

Personally I'm not a fan, but that's not because there's anything bad about it. In fact it's well painted 2D art with lots of nice touches like leaves falling down and shooting stars flying past the window. Wait, that's not nice, there's no air in space for meteoroids to burn up in, so those must be space lasers! Or maybe they're just those warp trails you see in Star Trek.

Anyway, the game began with these two approaching each other in a black void, but then it turns out that they're in entirely different places and they both have a lie down. Now the game's refusing to go any further until I decide whether I want to play as the woman napping under a tree on the Chrono Trigger world map or as the bloke in the sci-fi zone with the fuzzy wireframe blanket. Either way I'm going to have to wake someone up here.

I chose the woman and the camera panned over to take me straight into her story seamlessly. There's even a bit of parallax scrolling when it moves, which is cool.

I'm trying to remember the last point-and-click adventure game I played which had different storylines for each character like this, and I'm thinking it may have been I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream from the mid 90s. I guess Day of the Tentacle's almost there too, and this has the same option to switch back and forth between protagonists at any time.

That girl down on the left is shouting for "Vella", so I'm going to assume that's me and I'm needed for something. Now I don't feel so bad about waking my character up. In fact she's shouting a lot of things and there's no sign she's ever going to stop. They've sure written a lot of dialogue for her, perhaps taking into account that some players will be taking a break here to write some notes for their video game website instead of clicking on her to make Vella walk over. Sucks for the players who just want to hang out for a bit to watch the plants sway in the wind and listen to the mellow orchestral soundtrack though.

Oh fine, I'll see what she wants.

Damn those faces are terrifying! They've got giant shiny plastic eyes and detachable noses, but it's the pasted on mouths that bother me the most. They're very expressive though. In fact the game's kind of reminding me of South Park: The Stick of Truth, as it's like a cartoon animated in real time; except these characters have enough detail to actually be animated.

There's no dialogue options yet, but Vella has a bit of a chat with her sister here talking about things they're clearly both well aware of already and I'm not. Seems that whatever Vella's about to do is a great honour, though she's clearly a little apprehensive about it.

She covers her concern by telling her something like "I'm afraid you won't get any food because I'm going to beat you to the Maidens Feast", but I'm starting to worry about what'll happen if she doesn't. Look at her arms, they're skinnier than her little sister's! She's wasting away to nothing, girl needs to eat something.

I double-clicked the house in the background to skip the walking part and jump right inside, and found the lights off and her whole family there for a surprise party. Now I feel even more guilty for making them all wait so long. Though how did they get this room so pitch dark when that window has no curtain on it?

Anyway, it's Vella's special day and that means that no one's leaving until we've had cake. But the cake can't be cut without the ceremonial knife and the thing's gone missing, so I can either stand here with the rest of her family and watch them go through their idle animations for the rest of time or I can show a bit of initiative and find the thing myself. They are very nice idle animations though and they give the characters a lot of personality, with Vella's sister balancing on one leg, the old woman's brushing dust off her skirt and the guy by the window’s shivering and pulling grumpy faces. When I click on them it cuts to a close up and they exchange some lines of dialogue, though I'm still looking for a proper dialogue tree.

I can't find a button to highlight all clickable objects either, though if I was using a controller I'd be able to jump the cursor straight to each of them in order. It's all point-and-click even with a controller by the way, no Grim Fandango-style direct control. Thankfully.

The cursor does at least change shape when it's over something I can interact with, so I'm going to see what happens when I interact with that tea towel on that plate in the foreground.

Well the knife wasn’t there, but now I have a towel. And a cupcake!

This inventory only appears when I click the right mouse button or move the cursor to the bottom left of the screen, and when it's not around I have a nice empty screen, free of icons and verbs. Though this does mean that I've only got the one button to interact with things, and I can't even examine something by hovering the cursor over it.

Fortunately the graphics are detailed enough so that's not a problem... yet. I don't need a description to tell me that I'm looking at a plate full of cupcakes each decorated with a woman in a pink dress.

Though if I was playing on the game's hidden Retro Mode that'd be more of an issue. Funny how Double Fine went from demaking their HD game to making HD versions of Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle.

The filter sure makes the game look scruffy but it's not all that authentic.

Everything in this room's entirely cake themed, to the point where it's making me feel a little ill. For instance Grandpa Beastender here is sitting on a cupcake chair, though that's not why he's miserable.

Fortunately I've been given a dialogue tree this time, so I can inquire about why he's so grumpy and interrogate him about the missing ceremonial knife. Turns out that the guy's the only one in the room who dislikes the Maidens Feast and he wants me to stand up for myself. These folks used to be a town of warriors but somewhere along the line they went soft and became a town of bakers instead. And man did they go all-in on the baking.

So I asked him if he wanted a cupcake and he said yes. He also let slip that he was the one who hid the knife! But he won't tell me where it is and that sucks as I kind of need it to ever see the outside of this house again.

Well that's... interesting. Everyone else is being really vague about what the Maidens Feast is but Levina here has no problem with spilling everything.

A Maidens Feast happens once every 14 years when a Grand Mog comes to town from beyond the Plague Dam to feast on the best the town has to offer... the maidens that represent the best qualities of the townsfolk. So the town of warriors became a town of bakers who are really into human sacrifice. They do have their reasons though, as Mog Chothra will be here soon and if he doesn't get what he wants he'll destroy the village and kill everyone. Vella has to play ball or else her family will die.

Oh damn, I just realised that the woman in the dress on the cake is supposed to be Vella herself! It's a shame I can't have an epiphany like this about anything useful though, like where this bloody knife might be hidden.

LATER.

After 30 minutes spent locked in the same room, having the same conversations and feeding Grandpa a lot of cupcakes, I got bored and checked a walkthrough. I really am genuinely stuck on the first puzzle in Vella's side of the game.

Turns out that what I've been missing is that when I offer Grandpa a cupcake the typical 'end conversation' choice gets sneakily replaced with "Split it with you?" I didn't even notice!

So I selected it, and Grandpa went and split the cake with the ceremonial knife, giving himself away and giving me an opportunity to snatch the blade to give it back to her mother. Now the cake can be cut and I'll finally be free!

Okay I'm actually far less free now.

It's a great honour to be chosen by Mog Chothra and the other maidens here are desperate to be the lucky winner, but Vella's a lot less keen. She's trapped there in that giant cake dress though and doom is on the way, while her family cheers from the audience with pride. Everyone seems crazy okay with the whole sacrifice thing; the situation is just absurd enough to be believable.

The music on the other hand is on the side of sanity and it's playing up the tension. Former LucasArts composer Peter McConnell provided the soundtrack and it seems he hasn't gotten any less good at it.

Seems that the other four maidens here are genuinely eager to be the one to give their life for the village and no one's having second thoughts, so my attempts to form an escape plan with them are going nowhere. I've got a 1 in 5 chance of dying an untimely Mog-related death here and I'll need to solve this problem with good old-fashioned adventure game logic.

Okay, Fun Size over there is being harassed by a cannibal bird who wants the giant drumstick she's waving around, so I've decided I want it too. Trouble is I've got nothing to trade for it except a towel, so I have to either get hold of something else she wants more than food or I need to make her want the towel.

Oh crap Mog Chothra has risen from the water and he just ate the one with the candles! He picked her up with a tentacle and dropped her into his mouth! So... that just happened. I have to say though, I'm a bit disappointed that he doesn't look like a giant moogle from the Final Fantasy games.

You'd think this'd be over with now, the sacrifice has been chosen, but Mog's not going anywhere so I really do need to escape now. I had a chat with Drink Me who offered her bottle of water for my corset, so I made the trade, symbolically freeing myself from the constraints of tradition! But then it didn't fit her so we traded back, figuratively bringing me back to square one. And Delish on the left just got eaten.

Well at least this is more interesting than looking for a knife. Wait, I've still got the knife on me for absolutely no good reason, I can use it to cut my way out of the dress! But Vella won't do it until I've found a way to lure the bird over to lift me out.

Oh I just have to ask Drink Me again and she gives me the bottle for free? Uh, okay then. I hope she's very happy inside that monster's stomach.

Fun Size has started going on and on about how the spicy barbecue sauce on her drumstick is making her thirsty so I took the hint, handed her the shook up bottle and let it explode all over her. Now she's a whole lot more receptive to the idea of trading her drumstick for my towel.

And then she got eaten. She was so desperate not to be chosen last so I guess I can be happy she got her wish. Me on the other hand, all I want is to lure a bird over with the drumstick and catch it with a corset.

Nailed it! Vella cuts her dress and escapes into the sky, giving Mog's tentacle a kick as it tries to grab her. Well that was straightforward enough.

The audience is a little bit stunned by all this, and Levina is livid, ranting to Vella's family about how she's gone and doomed the town and everyone in it. And maybe she did, but that bastard already had four maidens when it was supposed to have one, so it clearly broke the agreement first! And that’s the story I’ll be telling folks when I eventually make my way back and discover people investigating the bloody wreckage of my town.

First though I've got hero music to enjoy, at least until the bird gives Vella the slip, leaving her falling through the clouds.

I may not be sold on the art style, but I have to mention again that this game is beautifully animated, and the transitions from walking around to conversation close ups or cutscenes are seamless. It's pretty impressive.

So now I'm in a new area in the sky with surprisingly thick clouds, where I can actually walk around to different screens, have funny conversations with people, work on achieving separate goals using items from my inventory and generally act like I'm in a point-and-click adventure instead of whatever it is I've been doing for the last hour. But I have to stop somewhere or else I'll go and spoil the whole damn game, so I'll stop here.

Though that other guy's still in his space bed. I should click his icon in my inventory, kick him awake and see what his situation is before turning the game off.

Lady, with that cover if tinkle fairies had come I think you'd already know about it. Also eww it'd be all over his pillow.

Shay's story also begins with him asleep and being bothered by someone, though in his case it's the sun, who's his mother, and actually the computer. She's also Jennifer Hale and he'll be Elijah Wood when wakes up and starts talking, so it seems that the voice acting budget went to the right people. Not that I didn't know that already; the voices in this have been fantastic so far.

I woke Shay up and kind of regretted it afterwards as automated arms grabbed him and put him through a shower, while the computer talked about how it used to change his diaper. Damn, the thing really has raised him as a mother!

His miserable breakfast is interrupted by an alert, so our depressed hero goes to his ship's high-tech command centre to play with the squeaky buttons and see whose day needs saving this morning.

It turns out that Shay is the captain of this ship and apparently the only person on it, so that makes it his personal responsibility to deal with all the disasters being reported across the galaxy. Somehow though I'm getting the feeling that they're not all that... real.

The computer's letting me choose which of the four incidents to deal with first, so I decided to start by sorting out the mysterious entity attached to the hull. It seems slightly more legit than the others, so I'm hoping it gets me to the actual gameplay sooner.

Well the game's definitely put me outside the ship here as there's no gravity and that's a pretty legit looking alien organism over there, so this may actually be a real problem! I'm going to see what I can do to get rid of it.

Fortunately I still have my talking smart spoon in my inventory from breakfast and it should be able to use its sensors to examine what this thing is. Or at least tell me how many calories it has.

Nope he just says he doesn't want to eat it. I guess there's nothing else for me to do here but stomp over in my magnetic boots and stick my face right into the thing.

Oh no, even this one was a game set up by the computer to give me something to do! You can tell her level of respect for his puzzle solving skills as all he had to do was walk over and he got a prize for it.

But what's in the mysterious box? I've got no idea, as a cutscene came on showing him back in the kitchen eating his nutrition paste and then I was kicked back to the bridge again. And I thought Vella's story was kind of restrictive!

Let’s go help those avalanche victims then I guess.

Hey I can open my present now!

It's... a Grabbin' Gary robot, with four arms and zero uses. Every time I drag it from my inventory onto something in the room there's a new excuse for why Gary can't help. He won't pull the avalanche victims out of the ice cream because he's unsympathetic to their plight, so it's up to me to save them. But how am I supposed to get rid of all that ice cream with only a spoon?

Oh shit Shay's eating it all himself! All of it, from the bottom. This is going to literally kill him. He’s going to die from this. The sun is a bad mother.

Next I saved the people on the runaway train by waking up the bridge mountain thing and making him stick his tongue out (I clicked it and Shay yelled “Wake up”.)

With three heroic tasks complete, Shay goes back to bed, where the night shift computer (his dad) tries to tell him important things, but he’s too tired to hear any of it.

The next morning everything’s the same as last morning. He gets his breakfast, his spoon tells him nutritional facts, and then he’s offered the same four crises to resolve. His life is a time loop except he's getting older and more mature and the ship isn’t.

So I’m trapped replaying four fake scenarios and I need to use my spoon, my Grabbin' robot and my cunning to break out of one of them. But which, and how?

Shay's getting a little tired of my stupidity now, outright telling me that he should take a dive on one of the missions. Well duh, but that's kind of hard when they're all child proofed! On the plus side I'm getting as bored and frustrated as he is, so I'm finding it very easy to sympathise with the character right now.

LATER.

Seems that the only choice I can make for myself here is what I want for breakfast each morning and even that hasn't done anything but get me an achievement. There's no branching here by the way, no way to change the path of the story. You either solve the puzzle and move on, or you get stuck and suffer.

Oh screw it, I'm checking the walkthrough again. I really am genuinely stuck on the first puzzle in Shay's side of the story too.

Actually the game's only giving me one mission in the list now and it's the runaway train with the mountain that sticks out its tongue when it wakes up, so that's really narrowed things down for me. But how am I supposed to make him retract his tongue? Yell at him to fall asleep again?

Wait, that was the actual solution?

We all fell into a spike pit, but the passengers were very understanding about it, and the spikes were very spongy so it was fine.

But I met a strange creature down here with glowing yellow eyes who threw me a key. So that's interesting.

The computer dragged me back to bed again, but all missions are cancelled until she's satisfied I'm okay, so I'm able to actually walk around the bedroom! I've finally broken free, and it only took like... an hour.

Well I'm only relatively free, as I'm locked in his bedroom now, but at least I'm in a situation I can solve with items.

I picked up a tank of compressed air and found a vent with screws that match the key I was given. The vent was blocked by an inflatable raft, so I got that out the way and climbed in. Or at least I tried to, but before I could get inside those arms came down from the ceiling and dragged me back to bed! Man it is really hard to escape a childproof space ship.

On the off chance that I'd just ran out of time I tried getting into the vent quicker this time and was dragged back by the arms again. So I guess the solution involves using the raft somehow.

That's not a raft.

There's not much of a resemblance, but if it's close enough to fool the computer then I might be able to put it in my bed while I sneak out through the vent. Then maybe I'll reach part of the game with more than one room in it! Maybe there'll even be someone there I can have a conversation with. I could ask them where the hell they found a blow up doll of me.

Hey it's the creepy guy from earlier creeping around in the bowels of the ship. Marek's got a slightly more mature (but no less vague) crisis for me, as he needs my help to rescue the helpless victims of a galactic war between tyrants and the innocent. If I were a suspicious man I’d think I’d traded one set of lies for another set more suitable for my age, but I’m naïve and desperately bored so I’ll go do whatever I’m told.

First I have to crawl though a vent to the Navigation Room and give a star chart to the Space Weaver.

Well that was simple enough. Wait, the ship's course is literally plotted by a robot weaving a scarf? Okay that’s some weird shit right there. This ship really is all hexagons and yarn.

I have to wait for the Space Weaver to finish a countdown and engage the warp and woof drive before we make the FTL jump, which is strange because I can usually skip cutscenes. In fact the game's so good at skipping things that when I try to skip ahead to the next line of dialogue it always skips the whole damn conversation instead. Not ideal.

Now that I've moved the ship to the required destination I need to use this abstract minigame to rescue the prisoners.

First I need to use the big arrow buttons to get an alien into the centre of the radar, then I have to hit the red button when the arm moving back and forth across the right hand screen is directly over the target. We must never actually meet the aliens we're rescuing though, because of quarantine reasons. Our diseases may kill them... so we can't even chat on the phone or look at them through a window.

Unfortunately I was only able to save two of them before an enemy ship arrived, so now Shay has to deal with the fact that he left the third prisoner behind to die! Things are getting a bit too dark for him now but Marek tells him to sort his feelings out and get ready for the next mission. Grown ups have to make the tough decisions and face the consequences of their choices.

So now I'm caught in another loop of slightly more interesting missions, as I go to different places and rescue more prisoners, though Shay doesn't want to throw himself off a cliff any more at least, so that's good.

Hmm, maybe I can escape this too if I trick the Space Weaver next time I give him a star chart. He's certainly giving me long enough to do something to the machinery in there before the drive engages.

SOON.

Okay now the shifty stowaway in wolf's clothing wants me to hack into the ship's systems and I'm starting to think that maybe I should be concerned about what we're doing. Nothing about this set up rings even slightly true.

Shay's totally sheltered and trusting, so when a sinister wolf creature asks him disable crucial systems and hijack control from the computer that's kept him alive all these years he's totally up for it, but I'm not gonna do it! I'm not going to fall for his scheme and I won't sabotage my own ship. Not for a guy with glowing yellow eyes and that voice anyway.

Wait, the game's letting me wander the ship freely now and I can do what I want? Oh hell yeah, let's go sabotaging things then!

I went roaming the corridors and found the kitchen where I had my breakfast over and over again, the ice cream avalanche room, the runaway train, etc. and I picked up everything I could along the way. I've collected a talking knife to match my spoon, a baby-sized radiation suit, a crochet hook... all kinds of stuff! My inventory has filled up with crap very quickly.

The game even let me put on a suit, go out into space again...

...and cut my air hose with the knife.

Shay's finally found his escape from this nightmare prison of his. Except not really as you can't die in this game. There no failure state at all really, which is extremely LucasArts.

The game's gotten a lot better now that I can actually walk around to different screens, have funny conversations with people, work on achieving separate goals using items from my inventory and generally act like I'm in a point-and-click adventure instead of whatever it is I've been doing for the last hour... again. Plus I haven't even had to check a walkthrough since that first puzzle, so I'm building up some puzzle solving momentum now.

Seems like a great place for me to quit.

CONCLUSIONMan I'm glad I didn't actually quit there, as Broken Age gets a lot better when it actually becomes the old school LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure it was promised to be. Not just in gameplay, but in humour too, as the world opens up and turns out to be full of weird-ass characters to talk to. Well okay it doesn't open up that much so it didn't really take all that many characters to fill it, but after being trapped in two separate overly restrictive interactive children's storybook prologues it was nice to find that there is a game in here to enjoy.

A few people consider Act 2 to be a let down after the first part, but I played through both acts as one complete story and didn't see the same split down the middle others have complained about. Instead I saw two splits. The first came when the linear prologue ended; once I had room to breathe the game became more fun and I found myself making steady progress through the puzzles and plot. The second came when the fun ended; I'd made it halfway through Act 2 happily enough but found that I didn't have the first clue what the game wanted me to do any more. Once I lost my puzzle solving flow I found that being stuck wasn't nearly as satisfying as not being stuck.

I definitely don't regret sticking with it and finishing the story, but I don't regret using a walkthrough for those last puzzles either (especially on the Vella side) because my patience was running low and I wanted to know how it ended already! Plus the game starts expecting you to use information learned in one character's story to solve things in the other character's and that makes no damn sense at all. This isn't Day of the Tentacle, they don't have time toilets to yell to each other through! See, I don't need a whole lot of sense in my story to be happy, just a little bit will do.

Another reason I didn't see a big difference between the acts is because Act 2 is set in the same places with the same people as Act 1! Once you reach that halfway point you've seen more or less everything in the game and you're sent backtracking across familiar settings instead. This came as a bit of a surprise to me as Vella's story in particular had been a journey up to that point. I'm not complaining though, it's nice that it lets you face the consequences of your actions seeing as it's relevant to the game's theme of how taking control of your life means taking on responsibility for your choices. Plus it was nice to see other characters finally comment on all the stuff I'd been up to. Just makes it a smaller game than I expected is all.

Still, it's a small game with plenty of wit and personality and I even grew to like the art style after a while! Visually and musically this really does seem like the best version of what it wants to be.

See, there's nothing horrifying about that face at all! Nope. She's no more off-putting than Mr. Potato Head, and everyone likes him!

Faces aside, I found both Vella and Shay to be really likeable and sympathetic heroes, and far less whiny and angsty than they could've been, considering that one had been trapped in solitary confinement and treated like a five year old for about a decade too long, and the other was literally used as a human sacrifice. And this was done to them by their closest loved ones! It's amazing that they're actually less sociopathic than your typical adventure game protagonist. I suppose it's no shock that they're both so well realised considering the quality of the animation and voice acting, though I can't help but think that maybe Double Fine would've had less money problems if they hadn't hired actual celebrities. I mean I didn't even know Jack Black and Elijah Wood were even in it until I checked the credits!

Unfortunately all the wit and production quality in the world can't hide the fact that the resolution to the story's big mysteries is a bit too... batshit insane to be entire satisfying. The reveals just don't justify the set up, and the game's not funny enough to make you laugh that off. Any hints I give are just going to spoil it and that's the last thing I want to do, but it seems like certain folks in this game went to a lot more trouble than they had to. A ridiculous amount of trouble.

Speaking of ridiculous, you know this has a 20 part 'making of' documentary series available to watch free on YouTube right now covering the entirety of its production? That's something like 12 hours in total, you could beat the game faster than that!

So overall I'm giving Broken Age a thumbs up. You probably wouldn't put it on the same level as its legendary point-and-click predecessors, but if you're craving an old-school adventure game, and you don't mind it being a little childish in tone and only having the one button for everything, there's worse games out there. You'll certainly struggle to find one with as much charm.

Thanks for reading all of that. Or some of that, I don't want to make assumptions. The important thing is that you're definitely reading this bit, where I remind you that leaving your thoughts in the comments box is great and you should give it a try.

You could also have a guess at what the next game's going to be, and how many months it's going to take for me to get around to posting it this time.

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The Rules

1. I must not use cheats, save states, trainers, hacking devices etc. to progress through the game. I play the game as it is and if I can't get any further then I quit. (Or run off to check a walkthrough.)

2. I must not read the manual before playing or play fan translations. I like to figure things out for myself and it's more amusing if I don't know what I'm doing.

3. I must not complete the games. I'm trying to take a quick look at interesting games, retro classics and obscure crap, show what they're like and show off the art, not make full 'Let's Play' playthroughs or reviews.

4. You must not read these posts if you're concerned about -- spoilers --.I may discuss the story and show screenshots of cutscenes and dialogue. But I try to make sure I'm only spoiling the game that I'm playing.